BSM in the Clouds

With all of the sudden hype about something that’s debated to have been around for quite a while, I suppose I should jot down some of my thoughts about how I feel Business Service Management (BSM) should play a prominent role in the Cloud Provider and Cloud Consumer spaces. I certainly hope that cloud computing could be a catalyst for broader based BSM adoption.

While I’m not the subject matter expert in all of the latest cloud, fog, haze or other buzzword laden technology talk in this area, I do strongly feel my views of BSM are as relevant here as they are in the traditional spaces we see BSM applied.

If you look through to cloud computing providers with the traditional IT management context, we’ll likely see numerous domain specific tools to help manage the servers, appliances, virtualization, storage, network, security, load balancers, etc. and various provisioning and automation capabilities within the cloud infrastructure of a Cloud Provider. There’s probably not much that would change here, other than a few new product entrants or fancy reuse/repurposing of existing products, protocols and what not. The tools provided are all relevant and needed to help solve domain specific problems by the various silos in the typical IT/Service Provider organization.

For the Cloud Consumer, we’d expect to see much more focus on an “outside-in” management approach that’s heavily focused on availability, performance, capacity, utilization and end user experience. We’ve seen the initial entrants here with Hyperic’s CloudStatus and Amazon’s AWS Service Health Dashboard. These are both good first starts at providing visibility into “the cloud” but … they somehow leave me wanting more. Finding the “right” balance of visibility into the cloud infrastructure will be something that the Cloud Providers will need to think about.

BSM. Think, Operate and Respond Different.

If you look into the cloud through the context discussed above, it’s difficult to fully relate things to the business of offering cloud services, and it’s especially difficult understanding how cloud services may impact Cloud Consumers and their businesses. IT management within the domain specific areas is about IT, keeping the infrastructure up and running is generally job one. This becomes even more important in a heavily virtualized environment like a cloud where you may have dozens or hundreds of “end user” businesses associated with a single cloud infrastructure component, chassis or rack in a datacenter.

When you operate with an understanding of the business, its goals and objectives, and how the cloud can impact those of the Cloud Provider and those of the Cloud Consumer, you have the opportunity to “think, operate and respond differently” than you may have previously if you didn’t have this contextual information.

Here are some of my initial thoughts here, more to come as I can dialog with others in the cloud space about what’s possible, practical, etc.

Cloud Provider

• When you build a cloud, provide some way to incorporate fundamental information into your monitoring and management tools that will enable the support, operations or engineering teams to understand the business impact to your company and those who are subscribing to your cloud services. This may be something as simple as a run book that contains key business and subscriber information that’s easily referenced automatically or manually by these teams. If you have a fancy autonomic provisioning or capacity adding wizard, ensure that the activities these things are doing is tied back to your business and your cloud subscribers.
• Strongly encourage your cloud hardware/software platform provider to incorporate capabilities within their technology/products that will enable you to directly associate the platform or components/instances built to the business, function, purpose, subscriber and the impact a failure at that level may have on those things.
• Every monitoring event, message, page, etc. should not only communicate a message about the issue within the cloud infrastructure, but also the impact to the business and/or your subscribers. This can be as simple as stating that “200 Clients” are impacted due to this component failure. With the proper operational process and procedures, the response to this event may be initiated differently than it may have been if your event, message or page had just said “Server XYZ is down”.
• As you develop Cloud Consumer portals and interfaces, do so in such a way that they can fully understand the impact your outages, incidents, problems and maintenance activities may have on them.
• Give your cloud subscribers the capability within your portal or interface to personalize the services they get from you to their business. For example, if I subscribe to Amazon’s EC2 service, in your portal or interface allow me to map “AWS EC2 Instance 123-11-1A” to my “Inventory Management System”. Better yet, let me also add information about how this impacts my business in my language and terminology such as when this EC2 instance fails, it impacts my revenue/sales in this way for every minute/hour that it’s down. (* I’m generalizing here…I don’t know the back end of how EC2 works or if you’d ever have an “instance to subscriber function” mapping)

Cloud Consumer

• Understand how your use of cloud computing may impact your business, goals and objectives, business services and applications. Quantify this. Document this.
• While cloud computing may make the need for an IT operations staff less relevant, someone’s got to manage and monitor the cloud services you’re subscribing to actively or passively. Ensure that whomever is tasked with that role, they intimately understand the first bullet.
• Work with your Cloud Provider (service or hardware/software platform vendor) to ensure that capabilities exist so you can personalize the cloud to your business services, applications, transactions, processes, activities and how they may impact your business goals and objectives.
• Hyperic’s Cloud Status should build upon their beta (if capability exists) to enable Amazon AWS subscribers to create their own branded version (accounts?) and associate the monitoring to their business as discussed above.
• Keynote, Gomez or others should get into the market to build upon their already well established performance, availability and user experience testing and benchmarking. Keynote has recently announced Keynote Internet Testing Environment (KITE) that I’d love to see capabilities for linking my business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities to tests I run here. Follow their Web2.0 Watch blog for insight into their thinking.

What are your thoughts on BSM in the Clouds? Is it really just the same things we’ve been doing just applied to the new buzz word? What ideas or recommendations would you have for BSM concepts applied to Cloud Providers (service providers or hardware/software platform vendors) or what Cloud Consumers should expect from a subscriber perspective?

Join in the conversation!